Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  They walked through leaf-littered streets, where pigs and lean, lizard-eyed chickens scattered from underfoot. Turner saw a tattooed face, framed in headphones, at a shattered second-story window. “The local Murut tribe,” Brooke said, glancing up. “They’re a bit shy.”

  The central control room was a small white concrete blockhouse surrounded by sturdy solar-panel racks. Brooke opened a tarnished padlock with a pocket key, and shot the bolt. Inside, the windowless blockhouse was faintly lit by the tiny green-and-yellow power lights of antique disk drives and personal computers. Brooke flicked on a desk lamp and sat on a chair cushioned with moldy foam rubber. “All automated, you see? The government hasn’t had to pay an official visit in years. It keeps everyone out of trouble.”

  “Except for your insiders,” Turner said.

  “We are trouble,” said Brooke. “Besides, this was my idea in the first place.” He opened a musty wicker chest and pulled a video camera from a padded wrapping of cotton batik. He popped it open, sprayed its insides with silicone lubricant, and propped it on a tripod. “All the comforts of home.” He left the blockhouse.

  Turner hesitated. He’d finally realized what had bothered him about Brooke. Brooke was hip. He had that classic hip attitude of being in on things denied to the uncool. It was amazing how sleazy and suspicious it looked on someone who was really old.

  Turner dialed his brother’s house. The screen remained dark. “Who is it?” Georgie said.

  “Turner.”

  “Oh.” A long moment passed; the screen flashed on to show Georgie in a maroon silk houserobe, his hair still flattened from the pillow. “That’s a relief. We’ve been having some trouble with phone flashers.”

  “How are things?”

  “He’s dying, Turner.”

  Turner stared. “Good God.”

  “I’m glad you called.” Georgie smoothed his hair shakily. “How soon can you get here?”

  “I’ve got a job here, Georgie.”

  Georgie frowned. “Look, I don’t blame you for running. You wanted to live your own life; okay, that’s fine. But this is family business, not some two-bit job in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Goddammit,” Turner said, pleading, “I like it here, Georgie.”

  “I know how much you hate the old bastard. But he’s just a dying old man now. Look, we hold his hands for a couple of weeks, and it’s all ours, understand? The Riviera, man.”

  “It won’t work, Georgie,” Turner said, clutching at straws. “He’s going to screw us.”

  “That’s why I need you here. We’ve got to double-team him, understand?” Georgie glared from the screen. “Think of my kids, Turner. We’re your family, you owe us.”

  Turner felt growing despair. “Georgie, there’s a woman here…”

  “Christ, Turner.”

  “She’s not like the others. Really.”

  “Great. So you’re going to marry this girl, right? Raise kids.”

  “Well…”

  “Then what are you wasting my time for?”

  “Okay,” Turner said, his shoulders slumping. “I gotta make arrangements. I’ll call you back.”

  The Dayaks had gone ashore. The prince blithely invited the Swedish ecologists on board. They spent the evening chastely sipping orange juice and discussing Krakatoa and the swamp rhinoceros.

  After the party broke up, Turner waited a painful hour and crept into the deserted greenhouse.

  Seria was waiting in the sweaty green heat, sitting cross-legged in watery moonlight crosshatched by geodesies, brushing her hair. Turner joined her on the mat. She wore an erotic red synthetic nightie (some groupie’s heirloom from the legion of Brooke’s women), crisp with age. She was drenched in perfume.

  Turner touched her fingers to the small lump on his forearm, where a contraceptive implant showed beneath his skin. He kicked his jeans off.

  They began in caution and silence, and ended, two hours later, in the primeval intimacy of each other’s musk and sweat. Turner lay on his back, with her head pillowed on his bare arm, feeling a sizzling effervescence of deep cellular pleasure.

  It had been mystical. He felt as if some primal feminine energy had poured off her body and washed through him, to the bone. Everything seemed different now. He had discovered a new world, the kind of world a man could spend a lifetime in. It was worth ten years of a man’s life just to lie here and smell her skin.

  The thought of having her out of arm’s reach, even for a moment, filled him with a primal anxiety close to pain. There must be a million ways to make love, he thought languidly. As many as there are to talk or think. With passion. With devotion. Playfully, tenderly, frantically, soothingly. Because you want to, because you need to.

  He felt an instinctive urge to retreat to some snug den—anywhere with a bed and a roof—and spend the next solid week exploring the first twenty or thirty ways in that million.

  But then the insistent pressure of reality sent a trickle of reason into him. He drifted out of reverie with a stabbing conviction of the perversity of life. Here was all he wanted—all he asked was to pull her over him like a blanket and shut out life’s pointless complications. And it wasn’t going to happen.

  He listened to her peaceful breathing and sank into black depression. This was the kind of situation that called for wild romantic gestures, the kind that neither of them were going to make. They weren’t allowed to make them. They weren’t in his program, they weren’t in her adat, they weren’t in the plans.

  Once he’d returned to Vancouver, none of this would seem real. Jungle moonlight and erotic sweat didn’t mix with cool piny fogs over the mountains and the family mansion in Churchill Street. Culture shock would rip his memories away, snapping the million invisible threads that bind lovers.

  As he drifted toward sleep, he had a sudden lucid flash of precognition: himself, sitting in the backseat of his brother’s Mercedes, letting the machine drive him randomly around the city. Looking past his reflection in the window at the clotted snow in Queen Elizabeth Park, and thinking: I’ll never see her again.

  It seemed only an instant later that she was shaking him awake. “Shh!”

  “What?” he mumbled.

  “You were talking in your sleep.” She nuzzled his ear, whispering. “What does ‘Set-position Q-move’ mean?”

  “Jesus,” he whispered back. “I was dreaming in AML.” He felt the last fading trail of nightmare then, some unspeakable horror of cold iron and helpless repetition. “My family,” he said. “They were all robots.”

  She giggled.

  “I was trying to repair my grandfather.”

  “Go back to sleep, darling.”

  “No.” He was wide awake now. “We’d better get back.”

  “I hate that cabin. I’ll come to your tent on deck.”

  “No, they’ll find out. You’ll get hurt, Seria.” He stepped back into his jeans.

  “I don’t care. This is the only time we’ll have.” She struggled fretfully into the red tissue of her nightie.

  “I want to be with you,” he said. “If you could be mine, I’d say to hell with my job and my family.”

  She smiled bitterly. “You’ll think better of it, later. You can’t throw away your life for the sake of some affair. You’ll find some other woman in Vancouver. I wish I could kill her.”

  Every word rang true, but he still felt hurt. She shouldn’t have doubted his willingness to totally destroy his life. “You’ll marry too, someday. For reasons of state.”

  “I’ll never marry,” she said aloofly. “Someday I’ll run away from all this. My grand romantic gesture.”

  She would never do it, he thought with a kind of aching pity. She’ll grow old under glass in this place. “One grand gesture was enough,” he said. “At least we had this much.”

  She watched him gloomily. “Don’t be sorry you’re leaving, darling. It would be wrong of me to let you stay. You don’t know all the truth about this place. Or about my family.”
r />   “All families have secrets. Yours can’t be any worse than mine.”

  “My family is different.” She looked away. “Malay royalty are sacred, Turner. Sacred and unclean. We are aristocrats, shields for the innocent…Dirt and ugliness strikes the shield, not our people. We take corruption on ourselves. Any crimes the State commits are our crimes, understand? They belong to our family.”

  Turner blinked. “Well, what? Tell me, then. Don’t let it come between us.”

  “You’re better off not knowing. We came here for a reason, Turner. It’s a plan of Brooke’s.”

  “That old fraud?” Turner said, smiling. “You’re too romantic about Westerners, Seria. He looks like hot stuff to you, but he’s just a burnt-out crackpot.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. It’s different in your West.” She hugged her slim legs and rested her chin on her knee. “Someday I will get out.”

  “No,” Turner said, “its here that it’s different. In the West families disintegrate, money pries into everything. People don’t belong to each other there, they belong to money and their institutions…Here at least people really care and watch over each other…”

  She gritted her teeth. “Watching. Yes, always. You’re right, I have to go.”

  He crept back through the mosquito netting of his tent on deck, and sat in the darkness for hours, savoring his misery. Tomorrow the prince’s helicopter would arrive to take the prince and his sister back to the city. Soon Turner would return as well, and finish the last details, and leave. He played out a fantasy: cruising back from Vane with a fat cashier’s check. Tea with the sultan. Er, look, Your Highness, my granddad made it big in the heroin trade, so here’s two mill, just pack the girl up in excelsior, she’ll love it as an engineer’s wife, believe me…

  He heard the faint shuffle of footsteps against the deck. He peered through the tent flap, saw the shine of a flashlight. It was Brooke. He was carrying a valise.

  The old man looked around surreptitiously and crept down over the side, to the dock. Weakened by hours of brooding, Turner was instantly inflamed by Brooke’s deviousness. Turner sat still for a moment, while curiosity and misplaced fury rapidly devoured his common sense. Common sense said Brunei’s secrets were none of his business, but common sense was making his life hell. Anything was better than staying awake all night wondering. He struggled quickly into his shirt and boots.

  He crept over the side, spotted Brooke’s white suit in a patch of moonlight, and followed him. Brooke skirted the edge of the ruins and took a trail into the jungle, full of ominous vines and the promise of snakes. Beneath a spongy litter of leaves and moss, the trail was asphalt. It had been a highway, once.

  Turner shadowed Brooke closely, realizing gratefully that the deaf old man couldn’t hear the crunching of his boots. The trail led uphill, into the interior. Brooke cursed good-naturedly as a group of grunting hogs burst across the trail. Half a mile later he rested for ten long minutes in the rusting hulk of a Land-Rover, while vicious gnats feasted on Turner’s exposed neck and hands.

  They rounded a hill and came across an encampment. Faint moonlight glittered off twelve-foot barbed wire and four dark watchtowers. The undergrowth had been burned back for yards around. There were barracks inside.

  Brooke walked nonchalantly to the gate. The place looked dead. Turner crept nearer, sheltered by darkness.

  The gate opened. Turner crawled forward between two bushes, craning his neck.

  A watchtower spotlight clacked on and framed him in dazzling light from forty yards away. Someone shouted at him through a bullhorn, in Malay. Turner lurched to his feet, blinded, and put his hands high. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled, his voice cracking. “Hold your fire!”

  The light flickered out. Turner stood blinking in darkness, then watched four little red fireflies crawling across his chest. He realized what they were and reached higher, his spine icy. Those little red fireflies were laser sights for automatic rifles.

  The guards were on him before his eyesight cleared. Dim forms in jungle camo. He saw the wicked angular magazines of their rifles, leveled at his chest. Their heads were bulky: they wore night-sight

  They handcuffed him and hustled him forward toward the camp. “You guys speak English?” Turner said. No answer. “I’m a Canadian, okay?”

  Brooke waited, startled, beyond the gate. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you. What sort of dumbshit idea was this, Turner?”

  “A really bad one,” Turner said sincerely.

  Brooke spoke to the guards in Malay. They lowered their guns; one freed his hands. They stalked off unerringly back into the darkness.

  “What is this place?” Turner said.

  Brooke turned his flashlight on Turner’s face. “What does it look like, jerk? It’s a political prison.” His voice was so cold from behind glare that Turner saw, in his mind’s eye, the sudden flash of a telegram: DEAR MADAM CHOI, REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON STEPPED ON A VIPER IN THE JUNGLES OF BORNEO AND YOUR BOOTS DIDN’T SAVE HIM…

  Brooke spoke quietly. “Did you think Brunei was all sweetness and light? It’s a nation, damn it, not your toy train set. All right, stick by me and keep your mouth shut.”

  Brooke waved his flashlight. A guard emerged from the darkness and led them around the corner of the wooden barracks, which was set above the damp ground on concrete blocks. They walked up a short flight of steps. The guard flicked an exterior switch, and the cell inside flashed into harsh light. The guard peered through close-set bars in the heavy ironbound door, then unlocked it with a creak of hinges.

  Brooke murmured thanks and carefully shook the guard’s hand. The guard smiled below the ugly night sight goggles and slipped his hand inside his camo jacket.

  “Come on,” Brooke said. They stepped into the cell. The door clanked shut behind them.

  A dark-skinned old man was blinking wearily in the sudden light. He sat up in his iron cot and brushed aside yellowed mosquito netting, reaching for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on the floor. He wore gray-striped prison canvas: drawstring trousers and a rough, buttoned blouse. He slipped the spectacles carefully over his ears and looked up. “Ah,” he said. “Jimmy.”

  It was a bare cell: wooden floor, a chamber pot, a battered aluminum pitcher and basin. Two wire shelves above the bed held books in English and a curlicued alphabet Turner didn’t recognize.

  “This is Dr. Vikram Moratuwa,” Brooke said. “The founder of the Partai Ekolojasi. This is Turner Choi, a prying young idiot.”

  “Ah,” said Moratuwa. “Are we to be cell mates, young man?”

  “He’s not under arrest,” Brooke said. “Yet.” He opened his valise. “I brought you the books.”

  “Excellent,” said Moratuwa, yawning. He had lost most of his teeth. “Ah, Mumford, Florman, and Levi-Strauss. Thank you, Jimmy.”

  “I think it’s okay,” Brooke said, noticing Turner’s stricken look. “The sultan winks at these little charity visits, if I’m discreet. I think I can talk you out of trouble, even though you put your foot in it.”

  “Jimmy is my oldest friend in Brunei,” said Moratuwa. “There is no harm in two old men talking.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” Brooke said. “This man is a dangerous radical. He wanted to dissolve the monarchy. And him a privy councilor, too.”

  “Jimmy, we did not come here to be aristocrats. That is not Right Action.”

  Turner recognized the term. “You’re a Buddhist?”

  “Yes. I was with Sarvodaya Shramadana, the Buddhist technological movement. Jimmy and I met in Sri Lanka, where the Sarvodaya was born.”

  “Sri Lanka’s a nice place to do videos,” Brooke said. “I was still in the rock biz then, doing production work. Finance. But it was getting stale. Then I dropped in on a Sarvodaya rally, heard him speak. It was damned exciting!” Brooke grinned at the memory. “He was in trouble there, too. Even thirty years ago, his preaching was a little too pure for anyone’s comfort.”

  “We wer
e not put on this earth to make things comfortable for ourselves,” Moratuwa chided. He glanced at Turner. “Brunei flourishes now, young man. We have the techniques, the expertise, the experience. It is time to fling open the doors and let Right Action spread to the whole earth! Brunei was our greenhouse, but the fields are the greater world outside.”

  Brooke smiled. “Choi is building the boats.”

  “Our Ocean Arks?” said Moratuwa. “Ah, splendid.”

  “I sailed here today on the first model.”

  “What joyful news. You have done us a great service, Mr. Choi.”

  “I don’t understand,” Turner said. “They’re just sailboats.”

  Brooke smiled. “To you, maybe. But imagine you’re a Malaysian dock worker living on fish meal and single-cell protein. What’re you gonna think of a ship that costs nothing to build, nothing to run, and gives away free food?”

  “Oh,” said Turner slowly.

  “Your sailboats will carry our Green message around the globe,” Moratuwa said. “We teachers have a saying: ‘I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.’ Mere preaching is only words. When people see our floating kampongs tied up at docks around the world, then they can touch and smell and live our life aboard those ships, then they will truly understand our Way.”

  “You really think that’ll work?” Turner said.

  “That is how we started here,” Moratuwa said. “We had textbooks on the urban farm, textbooks developed in your own West, simple technologies anyone can use. Jimmy’s building was our first Green kampong, our demonstration model. We found many to help us. Unemployment was severe, as it still is throughout the world. But idle hands can put in skylights, haul nightsoil, build simple windmills. It is not elegant, but it is food and community and pride.”

  “It was a close thing between our Partai and the Moslem extremists,” Brooke said. “They wanted to burn every trace of the West—we wanted to retrofit. We won. People could see and touch the future we offered. Food tastes better than preaching.”

  “Yes, those poor Moslem fellows,” said Moratuwa. “Still here after so many years. You must talk to the sultan about an amnesty, Jimmy.”